Sparwasser celebrates the long-overdue arrival of spring with
a program devoted to nature and agriculture. On Tuesday, April
4, artists Åsa Sonjasdottir and Nis Roemer will talk with
Michael Baers about their respective practices as they relate
to agriculture, ecology, and the juridical. Over the years, Sonjasdottir
has engaged in numerous projects that blend the line between
art, activism, and the investigation of public space. More recently
she has explored agriculture, collaborating with Indian environmental
groups and on her own hobby-farming projects. Roemer works with
publications and public art. His work is often collaborative,
and frequently explores the global, the local, and the environmental.
Tuesday's talk will focus especially on the links between globalization,
the environment, and agricultural practices within Europe and
without. Look forward to a lively discussion about nature, art,
and society. A special post-talk treat will be served.
Nis Roemer is a Copenhagen-based artist who works with public
art in the city, on the web and in the newsmedia. With a playfull
and interactive approach, he makes situations for change and
reflection. He has a special interest in the social and political
organization of space and in how processes of globalization affects
the city and our natural environment. For further information,
please see www.free-soil.org for more information.
Åsa Sonjasdotter is a visual artist living in Copenhagen
and Berlin. Apart from numerous projects involving public space,
she is also a founding member of the Danish feminist group, Women
Down the Pub. Her current project is a research work involving
the humble potato to be shown in Budapest and Amsterdam. For
more information, see www.potatoperspective.org.
Michael Baers is an American artist, writer, and educator living
in Berlin. He is currently in residence in Denmark as part of
the Danish International Visiting Artist Program (DIVA).

Continuing Sparwasser HQ's already 5 year commitment to self
economy and auto curating, DIALOGUES OF WINTER, DISCOURSES OF
SPRING (DOWDOS) re-visits Sparwasser HQ's program of "artists
inviting artists" in a series of evening talks open to nomadic
artists, curators, cultural producers and artist-run-spaces currently
residing or moving through Berlin. These talks hosted by Michael
Baers, Henriette Bretton-Meyer, Saim Demircan, Catherine Griffiths,
Joel Mu and Lise Nellemann have been organized to turn Sparwasser
HQ into an Open Studio, which works towards building future collaborations
and partnerships in Berlin and elsewhere.

Opening on Tuesday 28 February at 8pm and then every other Tuesday
until the 06 June, DOWDOS will provide the initial architecture
for invited participants to make new, or establish further contacts
in Berlin, by communicating and distributing their own subject-brand
of artistic ideas. Sharing and testing these ideas (and practices)
within 6 different hosted settings, DOWDOS will re-examine the
model of Artists Talks, by exploring different modes of presentation
and discussion. Each evening will have its own particular agenda,
structure and intended outcome, including moderated discussion,
presentations of artist-run-spaces and exchanges between curators,
open studio and collaborative projects with partner exhibiting
spaces.

"The Whitney Program Revisted: Berlin-Based Artists Discuss
the Program's Relation to their Practice"
Guests: Sophie Hamacher, artist and critic and Maryam Jafri,
artist

Host: Henriette Bretton-Meyer, independent curator

For this evening at Sparwasser HQ, artist and critic Sophie
Hamacher and artist Maryam Jafri will be talking about their
work, partly in relation to their participation in the Whitney
Independent Study Program. Both currently based in Berlin, Hamacher
and Jafri participated in the Whitney's Critical Studies Program
and Studio Program, respectively.

After their individual presentations, the speakers are ready
to engage in a discussion with the audience on questions relating
to their practices, the influence of the Whitney Program on their
current work and any other topics raised by the presentations.

Sophie Hamacher is an artist and critic from Berlin. She works
primarily with collage, reconfiguring images from major American
newspapers into her own painted protests by using documents and
reclaiming them from their mere informative quality. She has
written extensively on the relationship between art and document,
and the unconscious or conscious witnessing of historical events
through photography and film. After completing the Whitney Independent
Study Program in 2005 she gave a lecture "On Walter Benjamin's
Thirteen Theses Against Snobs" at the Whitney Museum in
New York. She is a regular contributor to Artforum.com and is
currently co-curating an exhibition titled "The Success
of Failure - Fail again; Fail better".
Maryam Jafri is an artist working with video, performance and
photo-collage. Her work focuses on the role of narrative in the
construction of identity, from the indivudal to the national.
She is a 2000 graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study
Program, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Malmö
Konstmuseum, Sweden and Helsinki Konsthall, Finland. In May she
will have a solo show in Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, called "Costume
Party: Colony & Native."

Everybody's welcome, including past and future Whitney alumni!
The evening will be held in English.

next talk: Tuesday 2. May 2006
Guests: Original Fassung
Hosted by Catherine Griffiths

For this evening's discussion the artist Heimo Lattner from Original
Fassung and epram.org shall invite the audience to a presentation
and study trip, which ventures from Sparwasser's HQ and out into
it's surrounding neighbourhood.

Having tracked down and contemplated a large portion of Berlin's
real existing animal sculptures, epram.org is currently focusing
its attention on those that exist beyond our physical grasp,
either in another time (past/future) or in the mind (planned/imagined),
requiring a whole different approach, and posing a whole different
set of questions.

Heimo Lattner, working with e-Xplo, has developed maps, routes,
sound and film materials as reflections of a multifaceted investigation
into location, context, social identity, landscape, and the public
space of information.

Original Fassung have been invited by Catherine Griffiths,
as part of her on-going research project mapping Berlin's artist-run
spaces. The project aims to provide a network for the simultaneously
diverse, sprawling and often less established project/artist-run/off-
spaces that make up so much of Berlin's creative landscape. See
www.youkunst.de.

Original Fassung is a series of talks and discussions usually
based at the project space General Public in Berlin. They are
based on an understanding of collaboration rather than competition
motivated by the curiosity of strangers or visitors to tap into
different fields, such as science, music, architecture, art,
dance, choreography, theater, film, politics, design, media,
economics, journalism. The project is organised by Geoff Garrison,
Heimo Lattner, Oliver Baurhenn, Cecile Belmont and Angelika Middendorf.

General Public is an independent project space run by a group
of cultural workers (visual artists, curators, among others)
based in Berlin. General Public was founded in Autumn 2005 and
has since produced a number of exhibitions, artist presentations,
discussions, film screenings, and performances. Additional to
its own program General Public occasionally serves as a host
for related external activities and projects.

General Public aims to install and uphold a collaborative,
process-related, informal platform for open thought, information
exchange, spatial experiments, transdisciplinary approach and
the reflection on contemporary visual and auditive culture. Although
operating within an international network, General Public's activities
are always informed by and related to its local context and situation.
Currently the activities of General Public are structured into
three distinct series DISK Sessions, LOGE and Orginalfassung
(Original Version) and an irregular exhibition program.

"Sensuousness and the Everyday in Measured Space: Haptic
Architectures"

Guests: Mark Paterson

Host: Patricia Reed

Sparwasser HQ invites to an
ARTISTS TALK

Dr. Mark Paterson
Sensuousness and the Everyday in Measured Space: Haptic Architectures
Lecture and Film Presentation | Video chat from New York
Discussion in English

A film/text and public lecture. The sensuous, sensory body
is kinaesthetic.
As we encounter and experience built environments, the somatic
senses
(kinaesthesia, proprioception, the vestibular sense) are engaged.
With the
recent notions of 'haptic architecture' and design for sensory
impairments,
there is an increased interest in the material mechanisms, materials
and
technologies of sensory appeal. Sensory appeals based on textured
spaces
play with the motile body, invoking affective responses. Using
particular
materials and spatial ordering, bodily trajectories through multi-textured,
multi-sensory spaces can start to reveal narratives, embodied
spatial
stories that come together through sensing and movement.

Dr. Mark Paterson is a lecturer in Philosophy and Cultural
Studies at the
University of the West of England, Bristol. He completed his
Ph.D. in Human
Geography at the University of Bristol entitled 'Haptic Spaces'
in 2002.
His research involves the senses, especially touch, as everyday
embodied
experience, and the alteration of such sensory experiences through
technology. He has also been an English teacher in Zimbabwe and
Japan, and
worked for non-profit organisations.

He is currently on Research Leave, writing a book entitled
The Senses of
Touch in Sydney, Australia, with a grant from the Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC). Recent publications include: Consumption
and
Everyday Life (London: Routledge) 2005, "Seeing with the
hands": Blindness,
touch and the Enlightenment spatial imaginary', British Journal
of Visual
Impairment 2006, The Forgetting of Touch: Re-membering Geometry
with Eyes
and Hands', Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 2005.

Martin Boyce is a Glasgow based artist currently spending
some time in Berlin. He was invited as a Fellow of the UDK to
work in Berlin for nine months, this fellowship finished in December
2005. Martin Boyce has exhibited internationally over the last
10 years. Forthcoming exhibitions include, 'Unlimited', Basel
art fair, Solo shows at the Frac des Pays de la Loire, Galerie
Johnen, Berlin, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva and Munster
Sculpture Project.

Mungo Thomson is an artist based in Los Angeles and sometimes
in Berlin. His work can currently be seen in a solo exhibition
at REC. in Berlin and in the exhibition Eigenheim at Kunstverein
Gottingen. Upcoming projects include Statements at Art
Basel 37, a project for Creative Time in New York City this summer,
and a residency and exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum
in Philadelphia in 2007.

The Danish Art Council's Committee for International Visual
Art cooperates with Sparwasser HQ as part of its aims to facilitate
creative dialogues between visual artists in Denmark and international
contemporary art.